How important is port forwarding, actually? (lemmy.one)

submitted 1 year ago by AVeryCleverName@lemmy.one to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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I've been putting off renewing my mullvad membership because of the port forwarding thing. I only want to use it for torrenting. Is it really crucial to find a VPN that supports port forwarding? If so, what's the go to option now that it's becoming increasingly uncommon?

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[-] TheLantern@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

One important aspect is that two peers without port forwarding will never be able to connect to each other. This is important for torrents with low amount of peers. Unless a connectable peer comes in to essentially relay data by grabbing the content from the other person and then seeding to you, you won't be able to download. For popular torrents with plenty of connectable peers to go around this is less of an problem, it will only cause some performance issues.

[-] dinosaurdynasty@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

This isn't quite true, if three peers support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Transport_Protocol, a third peer that has a port forward can act as a STUN server for the two peers without and let them connect directly to each other.

I don't know how well it works in practice, but Transmission supports it so I'll rely on it while this whole PF business settles down.